The Unforgiven

This article is available to subscribers only, in our archive viewer. Get immediate access to this article for just $1 a week by subscribing now.

ABSTRACT: A CRITIC AT LARGE about the Wagner's influence upon Adolph Hitler. A few months ago, the writer had lunch with Richard Wagner's great-grandson, Gottfried Wagner, a musicologist who has written a memoir in which he labels his great-grandfather a prophet of Nazism, attacks his grandmother for befriending Adolph Hitler, and attacks his own father–the current director of the Wagner festival in Bayreuth–for concealing the family's dismal history. Gottfried's accusations highlight the cultural debate over Wagner's anti-semitism and his influence on Hitler. A similar tension grips the other modern Wagner controversy–the unofficial ban on Wagner's music in Israel. The writer's encounter with Gottfried Wagner inspired him to do some digging in the New York Public Library, and he found remarkable similarties between the collected writings and sayings of Hitler and Wagner. The writer gives an overview of Wagner's life and his work. Most of the rhetoric in Wagner's major essays–“Art and Revolution,” “The Art-Work of the Future,” “Opera and Drama,” & “Judaism in Music”–came from the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who protested “absolute” or “egoistic” ideologies; Feuerbach thought of the “absolute” as a Jewish invention. Wagner saw a similarity between the cold, loveless Judeo-Christian religion described by Feuerbach and the cold, lifeless musical genres of his day. All of Wagner's essays are filled with coded language about the Jews, to which Feuerbach provides the key. The writer gives examples of this from the “Ring” and “Die Meistersinger.” In “Parsifal,” Wagner gave Arab and Jewish associations to the degenerates of the piece. On May 8, 1906, Adolf Hitler went to see “Tristan und Isolde” at the Vienna Court Opera and it made quite an impression on him. He was 17 at the time and he dreamed of becoming an opera director. Hitler's veneration of Wagner was so fierce that he memorized large portions of Wagner's prose. The writer quotes an anecdote about Hitler in which Hitler states that he is building his “religion” out of “Parsifal,” and he describes his disgust when, after first hearing the opera in Vienna, he had to walk past “some yammering Jews” on his way home. In comparing Wagner's operas to the Jews, Hitler says, “It's impossible to think of a more irreconcilable combination. This glorious mystery of the dying hero and this Jewish filth!” Gottfried Wagner speculates that Hitler's “Mein Kampf” was consciously Wagnerian in style. The writer tested that idea by searching for a list of Wagner buzzwords in the pages of “Mein Kampf,” and he found that Wagnerisms do occur from time to time. Hitler uses Wagner's word, “Jewification,” and he also speaks of “egoism” as a trait pure Aryans reject. And “Mein Kampf” was written on paper that had been supplied by Wagner's daughter-in-law Winifred, who was one of Hitler's early supporters. Wagner's magazine, the “Bayreuther Blatter,” published a barrage of anti-Semitic propoganda and endorsed Hitler in 1923. Hitler decked himself in Bayreuth ideology and he began doting on the youngest Wagners, in a grandfatherly way. “Parsifal” was the Wagner opera that Hitler found most inspiring. His most momentous allusion to “Parsifal” came in 3 speeches he delivered between 1939 & 1942–speeches in which he reported on the progress of the Final Solution in a curious code. In “Parsifal,” the character Kundry explains the origin of her curse, which was her mocking laughter at Christ. In those speeches, Hitler ascribed the same laughing imagery to the Jews, whom he claimed “are now choking on their formerly resounding laughter.” Ulimately, it can be said that Hitler developed crucial parts of his philosophy not by distorting Wagner but by taking his words literally. The most disturbing resemblance between the 2 men has to do not with content but with style–the relentlessness, the monomania, the manipulation of reality in the service of one idea, the blend of mysticism and hate. In the end, however, Wagner's doleful egoism ultimately frees him from the seemingly unbreakable connection to Hitler: Wagner's hatred is self-involved, while Hitler's hatred stems from great abstractions.